With the rapid development of the mobile telecommunications industry, especially the explosive growth of the 3G network, the increase of network traffic is far beyond the expectation of operators. Meanwhile, the number of 3G mobile users is still increasing rapidly, and the rapid increase of network traffic is a huge challenge to operator networks. Therefore, in-depth analysis of current network traffic characteristics of the operator networks is of great importance to network optimization of the operators and so on. Network simulation is a simulation technology that simulates network traffic transmission by establishing abstract models of network traffic and network links, thereby obtaining network performance data. In the network simulation, network traffic serving as an input parameter may be real traffic collected from a current network or synthetic network traffic (briefly referred to as synthetic traffic) generated according to some characteristics of the real traffic. The synthetic traffic satisfies some characteristics of the real traffic, but is not totally the same as the real traffic; it may be used in the network simulation to simulate characteristics that the real traffic cannot satisfy, for example, may simulate the network traffic after the number of users is increased, and therefore may be used to simulate the endurance of an existing operator network to future network traffic, so as to provide a basis for upgrading or updating operator network equipment. Therefore, it is an important research subject in the network simulation to generate synthetic traffic better satisfying the characteristics of the current network.
In the prior art, a method for synthesis of network traffic is to extract a packet quantity sequence in unit time and a traffic volume sequence in unit time respectively according to data collected from the current network, and then generate synthetic packet quantity sequence and traffic volume sequence in unit time respectively by using a proper algorithm, where a multi-fractal wavelet model algorithm, a Markov-modulated Poisson process algorithm or the like may specifically be adopted.
However, in the prior art, correlation between two constituents of network traffic is not considered when synthetic traffic is generated, and network simulation by using the synthetic traffic cannot realistically simulate the effect of real traffic on the network, thereby reducing the accuracy of a simulation result.